As Day Ends With Night
by TechnicolorNina
Summary: Seven-year-old Jyuudai's obsession with heroes goes a little too far. Yubel has to rescue him. Yubel and young!Jyuudai. Seventh in the All That We Are series.


**Title**: As Day Ends With Night  
**Author**: Nina/**TechnicolorNina**  
**Fandom**: Yu-Gi-Oh!: GX  
**Pairing/Characters**: Yubel and little!Jyuudai.  
**Word Count**: 2 826  
**Spoilers:** Uh . . . third-season only, I guess. Jyuudai's a chibi.  
**Story Rating**: PG.  
**Story Summary**: Seven-year-old Jyuudai's obsession with heroes goes a little too far. Yubel has to rescue him. Includes lots of musing on Yubel's part.  
**Notes**: Related to the previous fic I put out there, so this will probably start needing a series name soon. It's set in modern-day, though.  
**Feedback**: I would like some, yes, please. (And concrit is cool. Flames are not.)  
**Special Thanks/Dedications**: For **Gale**, who wanted little!Jyuudai.

* * *

_As day ends with night  
We keep asking why  
Look back there's the key  
Deep in another life_

On this ship in which we sail  
Everything is possible  
Keep on turning like a star  
Till you get to where you are

~ "Love (Is The Groove)," Cher

* * *

Jyuudai is a good child.

Yubel does not mean that he never gets into trouble; half a dozen times a day she finds herself extracting him from some mess that really ought to be his infernal parents' job, if they were ever home (bathing a squirmy, flour-covered child when you're only half-corporeal, she has thought to herself more than once, is a task that really ought to earn some kind of sainthood for anyone performing it). But he rarely does things he knows he shouldn't, and he takes good care of his belongings – like her. Most seven-year-olds, she has no doubt, would long ago have lost her, creased and dog-eared and maybe even ripped, in some far corner of the schoolyard. Nobody would guess, looking at her, that she's spent fourteen blissful months in his deck, but she has, and she's enjoyed them immensely.

Now, though, she is sitting on his bed, wings curled around her legs to keep them out of the way, watching him intently, wondering if perhaps she should suggest telling him a story or going into the backyard to play pretend that they are in the world of the duel spirits--there is something distinctly unnerving about watching her little Jyuudai tie one of his mother's bedsheets around his neck with a rather lopsided square knot before he sits down on the floor to pull on his shoes.

"What are you doing, _iuchanti_?" she asks him, and he makes a face. She has explained to him before what this word, _iuchanti_ or, in the southern part of Delain, _yucchanti_, means--"little darling" or "little love," the word her own mother used for her in years ago beyond counting, and a word this Jyuudai considers far below his dignity because of its girlishness.

"I'm being a _hero_," he tells her, and Yubel ponders--not for the first time--if there might be any significance between him choosing the word in a foreign language on a consistent basis. It sounds, she thinks, just a little like his mother tongue's word for his ancient title--hero, haou, the sound of the second broken properly into two syllables, just like the first. It sounds nothing like what they called him in the long-ago, but that, she supposes, is a memory he has either lost to time, or has not regained because he is yet so very young.

She smiles at his flight of fancy--Jyuudai loves to play heroes, and soldiers, and King of the Duel Monsters, something she finds immensely amusing for reasons he is not yet old enough to be told. He smiles back. Then he straightens his back inside his red footed-pajamas and tries to put on an imperious frown, looking every bit as noble as the day she first met him in what her own mother tongue would call _marya_, the time before time can be counted, and at the same time looking precisely as frightening and ridiculous as a growling pup still small enough to be picked up by its scruff. Then he giggles. No matter. Seven years old is still young enough for even her Jyuudai to be playful, even frivolous.

Yubel doesn't think much of the teachers of Japan--they assign no exercises of the mind, no rhetoric, no riddles, no puzzles that must be worked with the imagination as well as the eyes, and none of them she has seen bother with the kind of things appropriate to someone who will one day be the king of worlds. She has taken it upon herself to instruct him as much as she can with those lessons she remembers from the days when she was privileged enough--she, a mere girl, and a merchant's daughter besides--to study alongside the very prince of the land, but neither of them were particularly diligent in their learning, and many of the stories and proverbs from which they took their daily schooling are lost to her.

In their place she asks him to use his imagination, and he does so freely, making up entire worlds in the backyard of this little house. More often than not those worlds end in a headache for Yubel, who finds herself in the position of having to make sure the Yuukis do not come home and find that their only son has tracked copious amounts of dirt all over the living room not from his shoes but from the mud-plated bottoms of his blue jeans because his favourite card told him to play pretend out back, but that, too, is no matter. She enjoys watching the way he grows, the way even fourteen months has made him start thinking around corners and sometimes even straight through solid walls. It's becoming of a boy, particularly a boy who will someday hold the universe in the palm of his hand, to be able to think so, and she is as proud of his achievement as if it were her own.

Sometimes she wonders if the forces that run the universe have put her in Jyuudai's path now as a way to make up for the child she never had the privilege of seeing into adulthood, her Petram whose bones, for all she knows, may have been lying beneath the mud of Delain as long as hers have. She thought to never have a child again, but here is Jyuudai--not hers as Petram was hers, but he treats her as a parent and companion both, and she has done much of his raising. That much is enough, even when he's running in the house again--in shoes, no less, which will probably earn him a sound scolding from that woman who dares to call herself his mother when it is Yubel who puts the boy to bed five days out of the week--and even when he goes pounding up the stairs, leaving his deck on his nightstand and making it that much harder for her to follow him and where is he even going, she wonders, since he's gone into his parents' room and the only thing in there that might be of any interest to a boy Jyuudai's age is--

_The ladder into the attic._

Yubel has more than once been grateful for the form that allows her to squeeze through spaces a fully-solid body would not fit; now she is more grateful than ever, because the form she currently exists in does not have to fight its way through the trapdoor when she hears the distinct wailing slide of wood on unpainted wood as Jyuudai opens the attic window.

_What in the name of the Pentarch does he think he's doing?_

As a duel spirit, Yubel does not have a heart, not in the physical sense that most of the healers of this world would think of a heart. All the same, _something_ stops in her chest when she sees a small, sneaker-clad foot push off the sill, and if she still had to breathe, she would almost certainly have just passed out on the attic floor from lack of oxygen when the thought occurred to her: Jyuudai's balance is good, but he is currently climbing around a peaked roof wearing a sheet easily six times his size. Yubel's own imagination was fostered on the lore, songs, and history of Delain and those surrounding kingdoms that made up the Arc, and in the single second before she tears across the attic after him she is perfectly capable of seeing in her own mind the expression on his face when a single misstep brings his foot down on the sheet and he slides, first down the roof, then falling over the side, the part of the roof closest to the ground still almost twenty feet above it--

He is not crawling about the roof, and for that much she is grateful. Instead he is standing at its edge with his arms out, and for that she is very much _not_. There is a breeze--not enough to unsettle the sheet, but enough to ruffle through his hair and pull it away from his face.

"Kaibaman, go!" Jyuudai shouts, even as Yubel--taller than he by far and with a much higher center of balance--very nearly falls off the roof herself, flaring her wings to catch her balance, trying to run across its peak in the few seconds before the wind will gust again and either send him tumbling down the side of the roof, or--

"Save the duel kingdom!" he calls, and jumps.

Of all the powers being a duel monster has granted her, Yubel is perhaps most grateful for the one that allows her to simply disappear and reappear where she chooses. She tries to use it as rarely as possible when not in Jyuudai's immediate possession--trying to do it while separated from the physical form granted her by her card drains her energy--but she _can_ do it, and with enough will she can make herself solid enough to affect the world around her, at least for a short time. She doesn't hear the beginning of his scream as he realises bedsheet capes do not, in fact, actually work--she is in _antar_, the space between worlds, when that happens--but it is the first thing to reach her ears when she reappears below him, trying to hover backward in midair (something she really should spend more time mastering, probably), then throwing her wings out to break both of their falls when he slams into her, knocking the highly hypothetical wind out of her. His head jerks forward, and she lets out a loud cry as his single front tooth, still sharp from its growing, cuts into her breast. Now, though, there is no time to worry about the pain--she is strong, but so was the force of his impact, and so she simply puts a hand on the back of his head to hold it in place, squeezing his waist tightly with her other arm, holding him in place as she tries to right herself enough to go somewhere that isn't straight down. Yubel doesn't know if duel spirits can die or not, but it's not a theory she wants to test.

Her landing is less than graceful, but the boy in her arms is very much alive and well. Yubel doesn't bother immediately with his tears when she puts him down and gets to one knee in front of him--she hates to leave him cry, but if she doesn't take care of a far more pressing matter first, it won't matter if he's been soothed.

"Open your mouth, _iuchanti_," she says, and he does. Yubel sends up a silent prayer of thanks and relief, reaches one finger into his mouth--carefully, so carefully, so as not to cut him--and wipes her blood off his teeth before telling him to spit. Jyuudai sniffles.

"Mama-san says it's rude to spit."

"She's right," Yubel tells him, wishing with everything in her that she didn't have to agree with that wretched woman, but her own father was the one to tell her even a fool can see water and know to drink. "But this one time it's all right."

He looks up at her with those questioning brown eyes that make her want so very badly to take him back where he belongs--not the son of two idiotic people who neither appreciate nor truly care for him, but the beloved leader of thousands--and she nods. He spits in the flowerbed, and that taken care of, she reaches up with the heel of her single hand to wipe his tears away.

"Now come," she tells him, letting herself lapse back into the half-there state he can feel but not truly touch. Her strength is nearly exhausted, and she doesn't want to simply disappear and frighten him more. "You should put your real clothes back on, _iuchanti_. It's almost five o'clock." Sometimes there is a child-minder--not nearly often enough, because Jyuudai is a good child and his parents have no idea how much mischief he can really do to himself, the fools--but even when there isn't Jyuudai is able to put in the microwave the plate his parents leave him on those all-too-often occasions that they leave this most precious boy alone in the house.

Jyuudai nods and swipes his arm across his eyes. Yubel puts her hand on the back of his head and kisses his forehead above one eye.

"Don't cry, my darling Jyuudai," she says, and he puts his arms around her neck. She cannot carry him in this form, but he can embrace her, and she him. "You're quite all right, aren't you?"

He nods against her neck, not caring at this age that his cheek is pressed against hard scales instead of soft skin. Yubel cherishes the embrace--as he grows older they have become rapidly fewer and farther between, and she knows all too well that a day will come when he will see her ugliness and his love for her will change from mother to ally as he faces the battle he was born to fight.

Jyuudai's arms relax enough for her to stand, and she does--they cannot stay in the backyard forever--but even as she does something inside her quivers in rage that her beloved boy is going to be walking back into a mostly dark and completely empty house, that in an hour or so his mother will call and say she's been delayed on errands--errands, she says, always errands, and sometimes Yubel wonders what kind of errand could possibly take so long every day of the week as to keep a woman from her child--and then perhaps twenty minutes after that his _father_ will call, the worthless man who is a constant irritation to Yubel simply because she knows that without him she would never have been reunited with the boy she is sworn to protect, and he will say so sorry, champ, there's a project, new account, important papers that are more important than the son who is so _un_important that his so-called father never even uses his name.

Yubel calls him _iuchanti_, and sometimes _i samor_, "my prince," but she also knows and uses his name every single day, because she wants to make sure he always remembers his own identity, always remembers who he is, even if his "parents" do not. A boy who has forgotten his own identity does not know who he is, and such boys, according to her father, will fade like the dew off the morning grass, taken to the Shadow world by the knocker-men, troubled spirits who enjoy stirring up discontent and problems. Yubel will not let him fall into the Shadow world, or any other, for that matter. No matter how much she would love to take him out of this unworthy world that loves to hurt him, she knows she cannot. Jyuudai loves it, for one, and though she may not understand his reasons, she does not mind being in a place that pleases him as long as he still loves her. And for another, her duty is to protect him and nurture him to become once again Haou Jyuudai, the strong and just guardian of the Gentle Darkness. For the sake of the universe--for which Yubel cares not a dechre's worth, but she has a duty and is sworn to it--she cannot take him away from the field where it will all play out.

Instead she follows him through the door into the house, watching as he fumbles off the sheet, reminding him to take off his shoes at the door, following him up to his room to make sure he puts on real clothes, thank you, ignoring the dull throb in her breast that feels as though someone has put a coal beneath the softer, thinner scales that cover it. This, also, like so many things, is no matter. He is alive and he has not been tainted with her own impure blood. She can stand this pain easily--has stood it and so very much more in the past--and so she does not let on to him that there is still just a little blood trickling down the inside of her top and that there is pain, no matter how comparatively little.

What she does is to stand up from his bed when he reaches for his deck--he leaves it here when he plays outside, but he always carries it with him in the house--and smiles at him when he carefully clips the deck-holder to the waist of his jeans.

Then she follows him out of the room, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder, leaving the sheet a forgotten drift on the floor.


End file.
